Bullet points and bold text

Recently I read an article about how the average sentence length in Norwegian fiction books has gone down by 20% since the 1980’s. The results were based on over 7000 fiction books from 1980 to 2020. The study itself did not conclude on the cause of this, but I immediately thought of our decreasing attention spans, excessive smartphone use, and the decline of long-form reading. An author who was interviewed about the results alluded to similar causes, but she also speculated whether the popularity of audiobooks was a contributing factor, because authors adapt their writing to sound good when spoken aloud.

The trend of shorter sentences made me think of how the formatting of text affects both our writing and reading, and I remembered a blog post I read recently. It was written many years ago, by someone who appeared to care little about conventional text formatting. The blog post had no linebreaks whatsoever; it was a single block of text. One massive paragraph, with no entry points for eyeballs wanting to skim through the text, searching for keywords to latch onto. From the style of writing, it did not appear intentional; it seemed more like an oversight. As such, I was forced to read through the whole text from start to finish to even figure out what the text was about. While doing so, I gradually got into a state of reading I seldom enter while surfing the internet. Reading a text with no natural breaks anywhere requires more focus than usual, but it was particularly unfamiliar when sitting in front of a computer screen. The blog post stood in stark contrast to the way a lot of online text looks these days.

I realized then how much the formatting of text affects the reading process. It may sound obvious, but it’s worth considering how different online writing is from printed books, and how it has been changing during the internet era. The emergence of generative language models has brought another wave of change. Many are now familiar with the «ChatGPT-format»: Extensive use of lists, where the first phrase of each bullet point is put in bold text. This type of text formatting lends itself easily to skimming instead of getting properly engaged with the text. It takes little effort to produce, and little effort to consume. I’m not sure why this particular format has become so prevalent for chatbots. It could be an artefact of the data they were trained on, but I think it is more likely to be a conscious decision by the developers to reinforce the easily digested format of lists. Easily digested does not mean healthy, though.

More concise writing can easily be observed in a lot of online newspapers as well: Not only are the sentences short, but the paragraphs are brief, often just one or two sentences. Perhaps it is done this way to be easier to read on mobile screens. I am sure most online magazines track their users thoroughly enough to know exactly how long they spend reading each article and how far they get into the text, giving them ample opportunity to adapt the format to get the most clicks and time spent looking at their content and ads.

I can observe how this change is affecting me. The tendency to favor bullet point lists over continuous sentences, the habit of writing shorter paragraphs, and the desire to highlight my most important points with bold text. These dispositions appear in everything from emails to research papers. Anything to increase the likelihood of getting the message across to the reader, before their attention is sucked away to something else. Context matters, of course, and in some cases bullet points are exactly what you need. But I realize now that this type of writing often may be doing both the writer and the reader a disservice. When I write, the bullet points are useful for superficial thinking. The lists are for itemizing, categorizing, and summarizing. The long paragraphs are what I need to go deeper. The act of stringing together longer sentences is what forces me to formulate an idea coherently, and not just present a set of concepts or ideas. On the other end, the reader sometimes needs to be forced into the mode of focused reading in order to properly understand and digest the message. A bullet point list, a set of short paragraphs, a few words in bold; all of these are opportunities to jump ahead and skip important parts that end up in the background.

It is worth upholding the notion that important ideas need the long-form format to be properly understood. For writers, it is better to have your text understood properly by one reader than skimmed through by many. Dare to write longer when everyone else uses easily digested lists. As a reader, choose to get absorbed in a longer piece instead of glancing through multiple. Quality over quantity goes a long way in both writing and reading.